Description:This seminar will discuss issues raised in the lecture course of the same name – students are required to attend the lecture course. Through critical essays, novels, films, and music, this course examines commonplace, authorless songs—symbolist tunes (“I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground”), real-life allegories (“Stagger Lee”), and ballads that exist in a half-world between the two (“Barbara Allen,)—as elemental, founding documents of American identity. Owned by no one, these songs can be heard as common coin: as a form of exchange in which, over two hundred years or more, one varying performance or recording always elicits another. Commonplace songs will be examined as a form of speech that anyone can learn and anyone can use—as a tradition, comprised of eccentric individuals, that is always in flux—especially in the work of Bob Dylan across the last fifty years.